National Institute of Infectious Diseases Senior Fellow, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science

2016

Medical University of Lódz Visiting Professorship

2017

Achievement Rewards for College Scientists Foundation Scientist of the Year

Narrative

Dr. Richard Yanagihara, formerly a tenured intramural NIH investigator, was recruited through an interagency personnel agreement in 1995 to assist in building capacity for a laboratory-based retrovirology research program in the Research Centers in Minority Institutions (RCMI) program at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. He has served as the RCMI Program Director from 2000-2011, and has been the principal investigator of the Pacific Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases Research since 2003, and the director of the Research Core for the RCMI Translational Research Network since 2008. As such, he has played a critical role in coordinating the development of much-needed infrastructure for bioscience research at the university and across the RCMI community. In particular, he has been deeply involved in mentoring junior faculty, as well as developing programs that provide grant support for pilot projects and bridging funds. His extensive knowledge about the biomedical research portfolio and research resources at the 18 RCMI grantee institutions, as well as his long-standing personal relationships with RCMI investigators, makes him eminently qualified to take a leadership role in the RTRN Research Coordinating Center.

Dr. Yanagihara's own research has been conducted largely in the context of exploiting naturally occurring paradigms of high-incidence ‘place diseases’ in populations isolated by virtue of genetics, culture and/or geography. Notable among these scientific explorations, chronicled in nearly 300 publications, have been the demonstration of a cohort effect in the high-incidence focus of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and parkinsonism-dementia among Chamorros on Guam and the discovery and characterization of genetically distinct variants of human T-cell lymphotropic virus type I in remote Melanesian populations in Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands. In addition, his decades-long research effort on the molecular phylogeny and phylogeography of rodent-borne hantaviruses has led to the realization that shrews and moles (Order Eulipotyphla) and insectivorous bats (Order Chiroptera) may have served as the original reservoirs of ancestral hantaviruses. New knowledge and insights from this research will help to rewrite textbook chapters on hantaviruses.

Nerurkar VA, Yanagihara R. Specificity of an oligonucleotide primer pair and of a single-base substitution in the amplification and detection of env gene sequences of HTLV-I variants from Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. AIDS Res Hum Retroviruses. 1992 Jul; 8(7):1199-200.